Bootchart is a tool for performance analysis and visualization of the Linux boot process. Resource utilization and process information are collected during the user-space portion of the boot process and are later rendered in a PNG, SVG or EPS encoded chart. For embedded systems several developers have tried to use bootchart to analyze boot time, but problems arose. There have been several efforts to modify bootchart to make it more useful for embedded development.

ubootchart

EmBootchart

Visualizing Resource Usage During Boot Presentation on 'embootchart' by Matthew Klahn and Moosa Muhammad of Motorola about bootchart deficiencies in the embedded space, and a program (unfortunately never published) to fix them.

BusyBox

Busybox has a C implementation of bootchartd. It compiles to less than 40k (static uclibc i386 build). It will be available in the busybox-1.17.0 release. Please send bug reports, improvements to busybox mailing list.